We’re Going for the Cheese

 Last year I reported my embarrassment at discovering that my ongoing thirty-plus-year project of reading all of G. K. Chesterton’s weekly essays for the Illustrated London News would never honor my eyes again with the pieces I had read in the '80s in some collections owned by the Baylor library. It turns out that those were earlier essays written for the Daily News. So I changed my reading plan and made sure this year to reread one of the collections I read and loved almost forty years ago: Alarms and Discursions.

And – bless my soul! – there were all my old favorites. Last year I said I remembered especially a piece called “On Cheese” that began with the line “If all the seas were bread and cheese there would be quite a lot of deforestation in my neighborhood.” That memory was pretty faithful. It turns out that the title is actually just “Cheese,” that the sentiment appears just a few sentences in, not at the very beginning, and that the quotation verbatim runs this way: “If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living.” Here also was “The Glory of Grey,” in which Chesterton praises not only the beauty of different types of cloudy days in England, but also the fact that bright colors stand out on a dreary day, where on a sunny day even browns are bright. I love cloudy days and soon grew tired of hearing Texans complaining about rainy days, as if water were a bad thing. So this essay played a pivotal role in making me fall in love with Chesterton early in my acquaintance with him. (His extreme veneration for Dickens sealed the deal.)

I had read some, or maybe even all, of these essays to my wife many years ago. We especially enjoyed one called “The Philosophy of Sight-seeing.” Here, Chesterton points out that monuments, even the tomb of an aristocrat, are democratic things: they are meant to be seen by the public. And the public sees them in passing from one business to another or on the way from work to home. Visitors, then, he reasons, will get the proper effect from monuments not by standing in front of them and staring (GKC would have deplored selfies!) but by doing other things around them. We decided that when we returned to Paris, the most authentic way to enjoy the Eiffel Tower would be to eat at a sidewalk café with the Tower in sight.

“Cheese” also gives advice on traveling. Railway stations and tourist attractions all seem about the same anywhere you go, he says, but one thing changes from county to county: cheese. If you want to get a taste – a literal taste – of what unique pleasures a place has to offer, eat the local cheese. After reading this one, Nancy and I branded our new traveling outlook with the phrase “We’re going for the cheese.”

To go off of reading for just a moment, I’ll mention that in more recent times, Rick Steves often corroborated this view in saying that one should travel to Europe to see European people and things, not things that feel comfortable. Don’t stay in the five-star American hotel with other Americans; stay in the pension with the family that doesn’t speak English. He also gave us good advice about taking kids to Europe: let them plan it.

So one evening when our kids were about 8 and 11, we took them to dinner and said, “Look, a music professor is never going to be rich. But we figure we can take you on two good trips before you graduate. Where do you want to go?” They said the northeastern United States (DC, New York, Boston, Niagara Falls, etc.) and Europe. Excellent choices. We took the domestic trip first, standing on top of the trade towers just one month before they came down. (Don’t ask me about those nightmares.) When it came time to plan the European trip, we left almost all of it up to the kids. They told me what they wanted to see, and I made the arrangements.

But as we were getting the details ironed out, we told them The Philosophy: We’re going for the cheese. They ate it up. Well, I mean, they ate the idea up. But after we got to Europe, they definitely ate up the cheese, too. On our way up to the Bernina Pass into Switzerland, we saw a hand-painted sign in front of a small wooden building: Bergkäse. Boy, did we stop fast. and, boy, was that cheese good. And not like any other cheese I’ve ever tasted. The kids ate up other local cuisine, too, and they never once asked to stop at McDonald’s. Just a few days ago, our daughter reminded us of the delicious onion soup we had at a sidewalk café in Paris. “You remember,” she prompted, “at the place where we could see the Eiffel Tower while we ate?”

Dickens the Mixed

I’ve been wanting to read a recent biography of Charles Dickens (more recent than the nineteenth century, anyway) for quite a while now, but I’ve hesitated because the descriptions of these biographies always warn that the reader will find his hero indelibly tarnished. I’ve known that this warning could mean one of three things. (1) It could mean that the author, not having recovered from the twentieth century and thus unable to believe that Dickens’s sentimentalism has anything to do with any real life, just wants to expose Dickens as a fraud for believing in love and joy when such things do not in fact exist. (2) It could mean that Dickens was a horrible person and that I’ll have to find a way to live with the knowledge every day of my life after reading the biography. (3) Or it could mean that Dickens was a human and that I will learn of flaws that his early biographers kept quiet.

I don’t see how option (2) could be true. Dickens had to have in him something genuine in order to bless us with Mr Pickwick, Nicholas Nickleby, Captain Cuttle, Bob Cratchit, and Betsey Trotwood. So that narrows down the possibilities to just two. I have known and spoken with a Dickensian scholar whose views lay somewhere in the vicinity of option (1), so I knew I wanted to try to avoid any biography on those lines. But option (3) I wasn’t worried about. I already knew that the Great Promoter of Domestic Harmony separated from his wife in later years and had a relationship with an actress named Nelly Ternan. My love for Dickens had survived my discovery of Nelly, and the truth couldn’t reasonably get much worse than that, so I got ready to swallow the red pill and settled on Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life. And I’m so glad I did!

OK. Nelly Ternan first. Dickens’s affair with her isn’t the ideal story for a Christian life, I know. But having a second relationship after separation is not distinctly worse than divorcing and remarrying, and, although that sequence of events is no one’s Plan A, I’ve known people with that life story whose Christianity I respect. For extenuating (not exonerating) circumstances, I may point out that all but the oldest of Dickens’s children went with him in the separation, as did his wife’s sister. Perhaps Katherine Hogarth Dickens was intolerable to live with, and can’t we all find pity for the family who has to live with an impossible personality?

Tomalin points out other faults, of course, because Dickens was human and because “more recent” biographers have no incentive to keep his skeletons hidden in the closet. He demanded that publishers break old contracts when they no longer seemed fair. He always needed his friends to believe him in the right when any argument arose. He lost all patience with those of his sons (all but Henry Fielding Dickens, sadly) who constantly fell into debt and asked their famous father for a bailout.

But Tomalin also provided a lot of detail on aspects of Dickens’s life I hadn’t read much about before: aspects that, far from making him look more like a monster, made him seem even more funny and fascinating and pitiable than before. A biographer can concentrate on any threads in the fabric that she finds especially interesting, and my interests seemed to run parallel with Tomalin’s. She talked about Dickens’s frequent severe colds. She talked about several girls he fell in love with before marrying Catherine. She had a great deal to say about his interest in mesmerism and about one family friend, Madame de la Rue, who depended on Dickens’s therapeutic applications of his skill. Best of all, Tomalin gave a prolonged account of twelve-year-old Kate Wiggin finding Dickens on a train, worming her way into the seat beside him, and telling him, to his great delight, about all the dull parts in his books. Just after finishing the biography, I read Kate Wiggin’s own beautiful rendition of the encounter, and now I find that I must read this eventually successful author’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. My current guess is that the reputation of that book that I’ve received from culture is the result of a lot of option-(1) critics and that I will find it quite enjoyable.

And, of course, Tomalin confirmed several of the things I knew about Dickens that make him truly heroic, in spite of his failings. Besides having blessed the world with fourteen and a half beautiful novels and the second greatest Christmas story of all time (surpassed only by the original history), Dickens helped young, penitent prostitutes get educated and move abroad to start a new life, he aided and saved many fellow passengers on a train that suffered a horrific accident on a bridge, and he regularly went out of his way to speak to the homeless, the asylum patient, and the prisoner and to treat them with dignity and grace.

After Dickens’s death, his daughter Katey told her view of his life to a writer named Gladys Storey, who, after Katey’s own death, wrote from her notes and published Dickens and Daughter. In that book, Katey, who thought the time right to tell the adoring world that her father had his dark side, summed it all up by saying, “My father was . . . too mixed to be a gentleman.” Tomalin, recalling that line, sums up her biography by saying that Dickens was “too mixed to be a gentleman – but wonderful.” Amen, Claire Tomalin. Amen.

Adventures in the Ocean, Adventures in OCR

 I’ve lamented previously on these pages the near anonymity of Kenneth Roberts, once a best-selling American author and winner of a special Pulitzer Prize for his historical fiction. It’s not just that people who read Stieg Larsson or Patricia Cornwell don’t know Roberts. It’s that it appears the people who read Cather and Fitzgerald and Updike don’t know of him anymore, either.

Earlier this month, I read Roberts’s The Lively Lady. I didn’t know until I started reading that it was a part of his Nason family series, but it turns out that it is (at least!) the third in a series beginning with one of my favorite books of twentieth-century American fiction: Arundel. The series – Arundel, Rabble at Arms, and The Lively Lady – tells stories about the Nasons and other people from the Maine town of Arundel (pronounced a-RUN-del at the time, now pronounced ken-ne-BUNK-port), and all place them in American wars (as far as I know: maybe Roberts wrote other books about the Nasons of Arundel that I don’t know about). Lively Lady finds Richard Nason outfitting a privateer and going after the British in the War of 1812. It felt so much like Patrick O’Brian at times that I found myself subliminally rooting for the British before remembering: “Hey! They pressed our men from our ships!”

I enjoyed the story, but I did not enjoy the frequent typos from the weak optical-character-recognition scan. It seems that no one at Amazon reads Kenneth Roberts, either: they just scanned the book, left the file as is without any editing, and sold it for $9.49. My purchase alone probably paid for all the labor and overhead involved in the production of the faulty file. To give you an idea of the problems, I offer you a quiz. Match each word or phrase, as it appears in the Kindle version of The Lively Lady, with its definition or description. It helps a lot to think that the OCR is reading thick vertical lines correctly but tripping up on the thinner curves that join the verticals. Here are 10 “words” as they appear in the text:

1. fives
2. tinned
3. bum
4. bam
5. dumb
6. comers
7. yam
8. half fight
9. cudass
10. stem

And here are 10 definitions or descriptions for the words that Roberts actually wrote:

a. A building in which to house animals and to store seeds, fodder, and tools
b. A fighting blade
c. A tale; a strand of wool or other fiber
d. Changed the direction in which one is facing
e. The aft end of a ship
f. The celestial condition at mid-dawn or mid-dusk
g. The parts of the eyes out of which one looks with suspicion
h. What a privateer might do to a captured ship
i. What people spend in their hometowns
j. What the yokel did to the cliffs

OK, don’t scroll down farther until you’ve matched them all and are ready for the answers.


Answers below.


Answers below.


Answers below.


Are you peeking before you should?


Answers below.


Answers below.


And now:


The Answers

1-i: fives = lives
2-d: tinned = turned
3-h: bum = burn
4-a: bam = barn
5-j: dumb = clumb (i.e. climbed)
6-g: comers = corners
7-c: yam = yarn
8-f: half fight = half light
9-b: cudass = cutlass (Yes, cudass isn’t even a word.)
10-e: stem = stern

Parts of Parts of Aquinas about Parts and Types of Parts

Thomas Aquinas gets the largest number of pages in the Britannica Great Books set. Only he and Shakespeare get two volumes, and the Domenican Ox’s volumes are quite a bit larger than the Bard’s. (Thanks to Aquinas, I now know that calling Shakespeare “the Bard” is a figure of speech known as antonomasia. Antonomastically, Aristotle is “the Philosopher” for Aquinas, and Irene Adler is “the Woman” for Sherlock Holmes.) Still, the whole of Aquinas’s monumental Summa Theologica doesn’t quite fit in all those pages. What another Adler – Mortimer, the driving force behind the Britannica collection – left out of the Britannica set were a supplement that may not have been written by Aquinas himself and parts of the Second Part of the Second Part. Yes, that is Aquinas’s own designation for his very medieval organizational scheme: the Summa as a whole is in three parts, and the second part itself has two parts.

For 2020 and 2021, I assigned myself to read large portions of the part excised from the Britannica set, and it has become clear to me why, if something had to be left out, it was these passages. The bulk of II-II (as A. abbreviates it) focuses on the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. I fell in love with Aquinas several years ago primarily because of his clear, balanced mode of presentation, but also because in laying out Christian theology he actually gives me good, practical advice on how to live in a manner befitting a Christian. And I had hoped that these pages on the virtues would run over with wholesome instruction.

But, alas, St. Thomas is more interested here in analyzing and categorizing the virtues than in exhorting his readers to embody them. His primary method of analysis is to divide each virtue into . . . wait for it . . . parts. He even tells us that there are three different kinds of parts, so each cardinal virtue gets divided three ways. Then he asks such questions as whether martyrdom is a part of charity. Well, the answer goes, all virtues come from charity, but martyrdom is primarily a part of fortitude because it involves facing evil for the sake of a higher good.

Still, Aquinas made many interesting and useful points in the passages I read this year (on fortitude and temperance). Here’s a sample:

• Fear is sometimes quite rational.

• One can be humble proudly.

• All virtue in anyone whatsoever comes by the grace of God. (Not all grace is sanctifying grace.)

• "Insensibility," the denial of pleasures themselves, is a sin because pleasure in necessary things is part of the natural order.

• There is a good pride (happiness in the gifts of God) and a bad pride (essentially, the belief that oneself is more deserving of God than others).

• Pride is even more principal than the capital (i.e. “deadly”) sins, since they all flow from pride. The pride in the list of seven capital sins is actually “vainglory”: the desire for outward show of excellence and recognition of one’s special status.

• Knowledge of the truth is good in itself, but the virtue of studiousness can become the vice of curiosity when done to take pride in the acquired knowledge, to discover faults in others for the pleasure of knowing them, etc.

Given the subject, I’ll be medieval and leave that list at a wholesome, round seven points. May you use them to live more virtuously today!

Alec Forbes Is an Unco Bonnie Buik

On numerous occasions, C. S. Lewis emphatically expressed his debt to George MacDonald. He said Phantastes baptized his imagination. He said, “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master.” And yet, while it was a novel of MacDonald’s that so changed Lewis’s imagination, he also said of his “master,” “Few of his novels are good and none is very good.” It seems it was not MacDonald’s handling of character, plot, and description that so inspired Lewis. And to be clear, Phantastes is, as its name implies, a fantasy novel, and most of MacDonald’s fictional output consists of realistic (not to say realist), domestic novels.

Somewhere in the last eight years or so, I read that, among those novels he thought weren’t very good, Alec Forbes was Lewis’s favorite; I know I read it somewhere because I put a note to that effect on my current ten-year plan. I don’t remember now where I read that factoid, and the source could have been wrong. I also wrote a note to myself saying that at some point (again, I didn’t bother with the details; *sigh*) someone writing for Christian History magazine said that What’s Mine’s Mine was Lewis’s favorite of MacDonald’s novels. Well, the good professor may have said different things at different times. One thing seems certain to me, though. After reading Alec Forbes, I can’t help thinking that Lewis must have liked it better than some of the other novels I’ve read in recent years. Two pervasive features of the book direct me to this conclusion.

First, Alec finds Christian counsel in multiple sources. MacDonald’s novels often feature one Christian sage mentoring the young people. (I always imagine that MacDonald saw in these characters the kind of pastor and teacher he hoped to be.) Alec Forbes has at least four spiritual guides. There’s the minister at the state church. He has no “enthusiasm” (i.e., he doesn’t go in for revival meetings and prefers staid, liturgical worship services), but he consistently teaches godly love, through his actions even more than by words. Recognizing an awareness of the constant presence of God in the dissenting preachers, Alec prefers to go to their church, although he doesn’t necessarily agree with everything he hears there. (They read only the Old Testament, MacDonald explains, and view covenant as the only thing standing between them and what God really wants to do to them.) Alec finds a model of simple and joyful Christian humility in young Annie Anderson, with whom he goes to school. And then there’s the town stonemason, who constantly talks to Alec frankly about his need to escape Hell by getting right with God. I was reminded of the many doors in the foyer of Lewis’s house of “Mere Christianity,” all leading to rooms where Christian fellowship and worship of God can be found.

Second, MacDonald talks in the narration about God calling people "through a back door." The scent of flowers, the warmth of sunlight, a blanket of snow, a windstorm, a gift of a couple of shillings – one earthly thing after another in the story flashes forth grace and beauty and speaks divine truth to the hearts of Alec and Annie. But, the narrator explains, if they – or we – pursue any gracious thing directly, hoping to make the sacred moment last forever, the freshness goes away. These moments in the novel not only make me think of Lewis saying that MacDonald was the first author he had read who could transform common objects into conduits of light, they also remind me of Lewis’s central idea of joy. I won’t try to explain Lewis’s special definition of joy here. If you don’t know about Warnie’s toy garden, but you’re the kind of person to read this much of this blog post, I guarantee that you will thank me for telling you to read Surprised by Joy sometime in the next . . . OK, sometime in the next ten years.

But should you read Alec Forbes? If you enjoy nineteenth-century coming-of-age novels as much as I do, if you love to hate the draconian schoolteachers of Nicholas Nickleby and Jane Eyre, if you think you would like a story in which the male protagonist (sixteen years old?) builds a snow fort and the female protagonist (twelve?) wanders into it and falls asleep and needs a respectful rescue, if you long for a book in which the ultimate spiritual state of the boy is as important as whether or not he gets the girl, then yes, you should read Alec Forbes. Oh, and there’s one more thing. Gin the unco mickle Scots mak ye frichtit, dinna gang greitin’ and speirin’ me a’ aboot it.

My Continuing Quest Through Poetryland

 My planned reading forms the foundation of my adult project of giving myself the classic education of which my high school and college deprived me. (I also continue to study mathematics and languages just for the sake of learning, but I have no complaints about the way my schools handled those subjects.) Of course, I realize that what I’ve learned in my self-assigned regimen of learning, which has been going on for around twenty-five years now, I could never have assimilated by the time I was twenty years old. So I should quit complaining about school, claim victory, and move on. Right?

But still, why didn’t someone in eleven years of public school and four years of college teach me about the music of poetry? We studied some poetry in high-school English classes but never talked about, for instance, the ways rhythm plays against an underlying meter. I hazily remember a teacher once scanning a line of poetry and just leaving the alternating chalk marks above the syllables sketched out on the board, as if we had learned something by looking at an accent mark above the word of. I took a class in poetry in college in an attempt to remedy the deficiency, but we read almost exclusively modern poetry, and if there’s a rhythmic scheme to that body of literature, my professor never spoke of it, and it has totally escaped me since.

In any case, I plod along in my own awkward way trying to learn poetry, fully knowing that, however much I may enjoy Milton and Shelley and Tennyson, I’ll never really get their idiom into my bones since I didn’t grow up with it. Reading even the most enjoyable poetry, I still feel a lot like the way I felt when, at the age of 53, I studied Rosetta Stone Italian for a year and then went to live in Tuscany for four months. And how much sense does it make to read all or most of one or two poets’ works every year? Not much, maybe, but at least the system gets me reading.

This year I actually have three poets on my plan. My first assignment in poetry for 2021 was Robert Browning, and I have to say that I surprised myself by finding a classic poet that I really don’t like. Some I haven’t understood as much as I wished. Some, like Coleridge, disappointed me, but in his case only because he seemed inferior to Wordsworth, who is, as far as my dim sight can tell, practically perfect. But Browning I actually found repulsive at times.

As I said, it was a surprise. I went in to the year expecting to fall in love with Browning and simply to become acquainted with the second poet on the schedule for 2021, the now little-known William Cullen Bryant. But just the opposite happened. I will now smile and give a polite nod to Browning as I pass him on the street, but Bryant will receive invitations to lunch.

And now I come to the big problem in writing blog posts about poetry. I see from my stats that some of my posts about poetry are among the most visited on exlibrismagnis. Many of the visitors are probably people just like me, finally trying to understand poetry at a time when they fear it’s too late. I’m guessing (and hoping) that many of those views come from homeschooling moms and dads who are trying to give their kids something better than what we received. So I feel the burden of obligation to say something profound, something eye-opening about Bryant for readers who are looking for a cup to dip into the pool at a poetic oasis in the middle of the great desert of Literature as Seen by Americans Raised in Public School. So, here goes. But really. Don’t expect much. Just dip your hand into Bryant’s “November” and take a cool, refreshing sip.

Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!
One mellow smile through the soft vapory air,
Ere, o'er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,
Or snows are sifted o'er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,
And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delight to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.

OK, let’s start with the main conceit: the sun smiles in the summer, and we live on the memory of those smiles during the winter months, when, as you know, the sun is doing something other than smiling. (Side note: this morning, in reading a novel by George MacDonald, I learned a new, very useful name for unseasonably warm days in November. We in America tend to call this meteorological phenomenon by a phrase invoking a mistaken name for indigenous American people. In Scotland, apparently, the pattern is known as St. Martin’s summer, presumably because the feast day of that good man is in early November.) During a St. Martin’s summer, Bryant asks the sun to extend his beneficence for just one more day, stoking the inner fire that will make the bitterness of the coming December, January, and February more bearable. It’s a pretty picture, and who wouldn’t want to have the cheery sun as a friend with whom to hold such a pleasant conversation?

Now, to do my best at making a technical observation, I want to concentrate on some articles that my old teacher would have contentedly put an accent above. (To avoid alignment problems with accent marks, I’ll show accented syllables in all caps.) Consider the second line. My teacher (bless her heart, at least she was trying to teach us something about poetry) would have marked it this way:

One MELlow SMILE through THE soft VAp’ry AIR

“See?” she would have said, “Five iambs. That’s iambic pentameter.” But surely we ought to read the line in a more normal way:

One MELlow SMILE through the SOFT VAp’ry AIR

Now this I will grant my teacher: the effect I sense only works if you know the straightforward pattern of iambs. Against that meter, which lies in the back of your mind as you read the words – should it lie there? I don’t know; nobody ever really explained it to me; but this is the way it happens in my weird, old head – against that meter, the actual pattern of accents sounds like a change, and that change has a clear effect. To my ear, the two consecutive accented syllables in this case primarily serve to slow the line down. And we should slow down. It’s a mellow sun. The air is soft and vapory. We’re not in a rush here. We want this final solar grin to last a while.

The same rhythmic exchange occurs in the phrases “on the BROWN HILLS” and “the DARK ROCKS” and with “the BLUE GENtian FLOW’R” and in “a FEW SUNny DAYS”: all images we want to linger over on this last warm day of the year. Without the slowing inversions, my old teacher and I would have been accenting the articles the and a quite a bit. A triple accent appears near the end in “ONE RICH SMILE,” as Bryant makes his final plea to the sun to stop for a moment before leaving.

One last note. It’s difficult to write a sentence in English without the letter t. So, of course, it happens here and there throughout the poem. But in lines 2 through 13, the t’s are scattered, like the opposing team’s hits on a pitcher’s good day. In the first and last lines, by contrast, they come in clumps: “deparTing, disTanT sun” and “Piercing winTer frosT.” OK, yeah, I also highlighted a p in that last line. But doesn’t it have the same cold sharpness to its sound? This isn’t science; it’s art. So I can’t say that Bryant meant to distribute his sounds in this way or that anybody else even hears them my way. But for me, the beating voiceless stops in the first line hammer a note of scolding; the sun needs a berating for abandoning us each year. And those hard consonants in the last line make me feel the bitterness of a deep winter freeze.

Wow. Some accents and a few consonants. I’m probably working at a fifth-grade level here. But I didn’t do this work in actual fifth grade. So, better late than never?

Augustine Is Really Smart

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading my yearly allotment of Augustine: books 6-10 in the African bishop’s treatise on the Trinity. He didn’t convince me with his main point, but he did convince me (if, indeed, I needed any convincing on this point) that his intelligence embraced broad fields of knowledge and dealt with them in great power and insight.

OK, Augustine’s main point. Books 1-5 (which I read three years ago) deal mostly with terms regarding relationships between the Persons of the Trinity and with the question of Who made the appearances to Abraham, Moses, and others in certain Old Testament stories. I divided the treatise arbitrarily into thirds for my ten-year reading plan, but my artificial division seems to have worked, since books 6-10 shift focus to our relationship with and understanding of the Trinity. Augustine’s primary question is this: How can we love the Trinity when we can’t understand or form an accurate mental picture of the Trinity?

His basic answer is that we sometimes love a thing without exact knowledge of it because we have loved something else like it and reason by analogy. I, for instance, will sit down eagerly later this year as I begin The Claverings, a book by Anthony Trollope that I have not read. Why do I relish the experience in anticipation when I don’t know the book? Because I have read and enjoyed several other Trollope books, so my love is founded on the likelihood that I will enjoy this one as much.

What then, Augustine asks, do we know that is like the Trinity so that we can love the Trinity as we begin and continue to know the ultimately incomprehensible God in three Persons? There is, Augustine tells us, a trinity in my mind: the mind itself, its knowledge, and its love. This answer works to some extent: the knowledge and the love, like the Word and the Holy Spirit being respectively begotten and breathed by the Father, come from and reflect the mind itself, and the mind is not what it is without its actions of knowing and willing. But do knowledge and love have a separate identity that bears an analogy to Christ saying that He doesn’t know everything the Father knows? And doesn’t the mind perform other functions, as well, like reasoning? Augustine suggests a second trinity of human mentality: memory, understanding, and will. In some ways, this analogy seems better, and in other ways it seems just as arbitrarily limited to three as did the first proposition. But Augustine’s question still seems important to me, and his approach still provides a door to my search for an answer. I am inclined to say that I love the Trinity because God in three Persons is like nothing else in existence (thing A cannot both be with thing B and be thing B except in the case of the Trinity: John tells us that, in the beginning, the Word was with God and the Word was God), and I like other things that are unique. Yeah, there’s the problem of saying that all these things are alike in that they aren’t like anything else.

My dissatisfaction with his answers doesn’t negate the point that Augustine wrestles with a fascinating, important question. And the intelligence and knowledge he uses to put all the parts of the argument together are astonishing. Did anyone else before Augustine ever examine the human mind to the point of questioning why we love things we don’t know? Plato and Aristotle both have lots of helpful things to say about loving what we do know and even loving what we mistakenly think we know. But loving what we don’t know? Augustine also appears to me to have invented, some 1500 years ahead of time, the field of semiotics, with all of his analysis of words and mental thoughts as signs of both external things and of each other. In other books, he talks about music, mathematics, and history. In the Confessions, he takes on the mystery of consciousness of time.

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine commended study of all these fields and more, thus, I thank God, granting approval for medieval Christians to study literature and grammar and astronomy and geometry and to create cathedral schools and universities. He is the most influential Christian writer between the writing of the New Testament and now. Had I never read a word of his prodigious output, he would still bear responsibility for much of the shape of my intellectual life, as he does for anyone geeky and odd enough to be reading this blog. Graduates wear robes at school commencements because monks delivered medieval education because Augustine sanctioned academic pursuit for Christendom.

So what can we call Augustine? An intellectual powerhouse? The founder of Christian academicism? A beacon atop the mountain of western education? It’s difficult to find the right words to describe him adequately and to capture the importance of his far-reaching achievement. He isn’t like anyone else.